PAY-PER-RESULTS SEO (PPR) has changed the lives of my staff at Strategy Internet Marketing in just a year since we launched it. There are many more of them, they are better paid, and there is a
buzz about the place.

In an industry that has suffered from snake oil merchants but still demands that clients take all the risk by paying fees, it struck me that there must be a way of sharing the risk. We first dreamed up a pricing model which was a hybrid mix of fees and results in order to share the risks with the client. This was successful and, after trials, we went the whole hog and priced just on results. The clients love PAY-PER-RESULTS SEO (PPR), they know your skills, reputation and fees are on the - line if you don’t perform you don’t get paid.

That rather focuses the mind on the job in hand. And that has brought us talking to some of the biggest names in UK business from groceries to electrical goods and from cosmetic surgery to finance.

Interestingly, it has also brought to the table many clients who, while they may be spending a lot on PPC, have been shy of trying organic optimisation. There are many prospective clients who have been burned in the past by the snake oil merchants promising the earth and not performing. You know the sort - “you will get a guaranteed top 10 position or your money back”. Getting a top ten position (particularly for a poor key phrase) is just bunk. What clients want is traffic, and good quality traffic that will buy the goods or services that they are selling. And they are happy to pay if you can bring them that traffic. Look at the success of PPC; this is a results based model and some clients are paying literally millions of pounds a year on this service.

We started with charging on increased visitors, and we probably have half our clients on this basis. But we don’t just go for volume of visitors; we also increase the quality of the traffic.

“…fees are on the line - if you don’t perform you don’t get paid”

Recently we have added a second pricing model, which we have dubbed PAY-PER-ENQUIRY SEO (PPE). This is based on the increased number of completed enquiry forms on the client’s own web site. Here we are taking a further risk as the visitors we attract have to be interested enough to complete the enquiry form. Many have shown an interest in this pricing model and we have started to take on clients with this.

Of course, we still do a fee based service too, and some clients prefer this because it allows them to budget accurately.

The important point though is that these are just pricing models. What we do in terms of organic optimisation on a client’s web site is the same regardless of which pricing model he has chosen. We still do a Strategic Action Plan and agree Objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s); we still research the competition; we still do deep, multilevel keyword research using many databases; we still obtain quality relevant inbound links, and still produce detail reports. The quality of how we do organic optimisation doesn’t change - there are just different ways of pricing it.

This pricing innovation has got Strategy Internet Marketing noticed, and brought us clients. And we plan to continue innovating, not just in pricing but also in ways of optimising, the types of service we provide and in levels of customer service too. Innovation brings results.

Don’t worry about my staff coping with more change though - they love the extra rewards and the buzz and embrace innovation.

See us at Stand No.1 at the Online Marketing and Media Show 08 on 24/25 June.

Good links will get you better rankings.

Great links will shoot you to the top!

Why? Because links are something that search engines use (particularly Google) in order to understand what your pages are about. They are a kind of vote of confidence expressed by one site to another which is why better links have more power to influence your rankings.

Google was invented by a couple of PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They decided that one of the ways to distinguish one page from another in terms of its authority on its topic was to base it on a kind of academic model. Academic papers are backed up by citations and in the same way web pages could be backed up by authority links from on-topic sites linking back and providing a vote of confidence in the page’s relevance to its topic.

This is why relevant links are so important and why some links carry more weight than others. Links from authority sites such as government sites and academic institutions carry more weight than commercial sites. Commercial sites that have established their own authority on their topic provide more weighty links than a new website that is still getting bedded in. Getting the only link on a page that is written about a particular topic carries more weight than a links page with tens of links on it.

Do you see how it goes…..?

Generally, the more links you get the better but specifically the more weighty the link, the faster you will get results.